The present invention relates generally to parking management and, more particularly, to a parking system and an apparatus, which may be configured to identify available parking spaces for vehicles and guide the vehicles to the available parking spaces.
Automobiles play an important and sometimes indispensable role as a means for transporting people. As a result, the number of automobiles in industrialized cities and neighboring regions continues to grow, resulting in increasing occurrences of traffic jams and rising demands for parking spaces. Locating a vacant parking space may sometimes be a time-consuming and laborious task for many drivers and motorists. Furthermore, parking lots that service shopping malls, hospitals, airports, mass transit stations, and the like often are not designed well to suit the drivers' needs. For example, electronic displays may be provided in such a parking lot for indicating the number of vacant parking spaces, which may be calculated by a sensor mounted at an entrance to the parking lot. However, the parking information or vacancy statistics provided by the electronic displays may not correctly reflect the real-time parking conditions. Moreover, users who even pay to enter the parking lot may have to search for an unoccupied parking place, and may have to self-navigate to an exit when leaving the parking place. In a large public parking facility without preassigned parking spaces, such a search may be time consuming, harmful to the environment, and often frustrating.
It may therefore be desirable to have a system capable of managing a parking facility, such as a system that is configured for monitoring parking spaces and guiding a vehicle to an available parking space. It may also be desirable to have a device capable of detecting the parking status of a parking space in a parking facility and transmitting the parking status in a wireless network.